Second-hand Reading

The story of the Arab knight Muhammad Bin Qasim Al-Thaqafi who rescued many women and children from pirates in the Indian Ocean. He entered a fierce war against King Dahr who was sharing the spoils with the pirates, with the help of his friend Ziad and his mentor Abu Al-Asud.

The creation of an infinite space. Light modulations over water surfaces, conjugating into multiple alterations. Time and light being reshaped through a liquid lens. The illusion of a starry night turns into a sea “roofed over by rainbows.”

A day in the city of Berlin, which experienced an industrial boom in the 1920s, and still provides an insight into the living and working conditions at that time. Germany had just recovered a little from the worst consequences of the First World War, the great economic crisis was still a few years away and Hitler was not yet an issue at the time.

Features four distinct, bizarre, existential tales about people whose lives are in transition, who are each asking questions about themselves, their environments, and about God(s).

A dying man in his forties recalls his childhood, his mother, the war and personal moments that tell of and juxtapose pivotal moments in Soviet history with daily life.

A Sunday walk in a forest turns into a poetic journey on perception.

To summon the third eye awakening, we should not agitate the surface of the mind and physical eye, but soothe and provoke the third eye to awaken. In the gap of time, the flame of images that rise and become eternity is forming the rhythm and the speech. The teachings received in my travels and in green crystals. In distanced mysteries, the half rotten emulsion is the art of metaphysical connection and path of the awakening.

Virtual reality experimental short film where Katya guides you through how to properly pull your own teeth out.

The inner world of the great painter Max Ernst is the subject of this film. One of the principal founders of Surrealism, Max Ernst explores the nature of materials and the emotional significance of shapes to combine with his collages and netherworld canvases. The director and Ernst together use the film creatively as a medium to explain the artist's own development.

Suppressed memories reach a boiling point. An animated tale of longing. “The Experimental section saw Non Films’ Dull Hope scoop the premier place as category winner. Half animation and half movie footage, this hybrid resonated very much with the judging panel who deemed it to be a sad dirge on personal memories and heartbreak.” – The Guardian Directed & Animated by Brian Ratigan Music & Sound Design by Nick Punch (R.I.P.) Produced by Non Films

The quasi-fictional story of transgender sex workers living in Rio de Janeiro's swampy red light district, who are joined by a group of hippies and a runaway stockbroker, "Mangue-Bangue" is the paradigmatic expression of the post-1968 spirit of desbunde, the Brazilian slang catchword for "sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll".

An experimental film comprised of Stanley Kubrick's THE SHINING played forwards and backwards at the same time on the same screen, creating bizarre juxtapositions and startling synchronicities.

A representation of my own memory during the course of this year, illustrated by visuals.

Television was invented as a result of scientific and technical research. Its power as a medium of news and entertainment altered all preceding media of news and entertainment

Arriving in the US with a background in abstract art, opera, and film—including work with German director Werner Schroeter—Vogl began making Super8 films in New York that stripped away the stylistic markers of Hollywood, New Wave cinema of the 1960s and ’70s, and classic avant-garde film, leaving only traces of their generic conventions. For the first hour of OK Today Tomorrow, he stages a series of fraught encounters around the city between four gentrified New Yorkers before abandoning his vague narrative of youthful angst altogether in favor of documenting the urban landscape itself. The dusk-to-dawn “city symphony” that ends the film resembles similar Super8 social studies by Vogl’s uptown contemporary John Ahearn; both recorded the daily lives of working-class black and immigrant communities on the streets of a city on the verge of the corporate takeover and sweeping gentrification that followed in the 1980s and ’90s. Preserved by The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Electro-Pythagorus is an intimate and subjective portrait of the late Martin Bartlett, the Canadian electronic music pioneer who studied with Pauline Oliveros, David Tudor, John Cage, and Pandit Pran Nath. His contribution as an interdisciplinary composer, educator, and founding member of Western Front, though undoubtedly extensive, is in danger of being erased from cultural memory since his death from AIDS in 1993. Navigating an array of archival materials including letters, correspondences, notebooks, personal photos, and a huge body of unreleased music and field recordings held at the archives of Simon Fraser University, Electro-Pythagoras is a journey through the evolution of Bartlett’s musical time and space, softly guided by Luke Fowler’s insightful camera and montage—creating an experimental portrait that defies one-dimensionality.

An experimental film shot on distressed 16mm celluloid that reveals various men on the beach or in swimming pools, in various states of lounging in the lazy California sun.

A film about endless processes. Images reappearing. New sentences being written.

"Like a Dream That Vanishes" continues Sternberg’s work in film both thematically and formally: the ephemerality of life echoed in the temporal nature of film, as the stuff of life echoed on the energy, life-force in rhythmic light pulses (Your life is like a candle burning). Imageless emulsion is inter-cut with brief shots of natural elements and mise-en-scene of the stages of human life: a little boy runs and falls; teens hang out together at night smoking; sun shines through tree branches; men pace, waiting; flashes of lightning; an elderly man speaks philosophically about miracles.

a sentimental audiovisual collage from december 2023